Radio Free Fundi Podcasts

A poetry reading by Gary Snyder on March 21, 1987 at the University of California - Berkeley. Enjoy.q



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Spoken word revelries from Tom Waits on his 2008 "Glitter & Doom" tour. Ain't nothin' else like Tom tellin' a tale...



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I had the amazing opportunity to interview the legendary author and psychedelic spelunker Tom Robbins on stage at Boundary Bay Brewery in Bellingham, Washington on May 14, 2009. We gave a reading from his novel B is for Beer to a sold-out audience in the outdoor beer garden, accompanied by live music, skits and general revelrie.

At the end of the event, I joined Tom on stage for a conversation -- I had over 20 questions prepared and rehearsed, though got less than half-dozen out. He was particularly interested in me asking him "How did you get started as a writer?" This question set him up for a delectable riff involving Elvis, a dwarf in a green suit, a blonde-in-distress and secret underground lakes beneath Graceland. Photo by Scott Glackman!



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He helped tend the chickens in a two-story barn and milk the family's cows. His father planted the apple tree that can still be seen out back, and some of the fir trees stand even taller than before. But mostly, the woods he remembers are long gone, and the animals with them replaced today by concrete garden statuary rabbits snugged into the closely clipped landscaping that surrounds the house today.

On Tuesday, traffic beat by Snyder on what used to be a quiet gravel lane. Strip malls and housing crowded in where the trees used to be.

"The changes that have happened here are the same as everywhere in the West," Snyder said. "It goes with the uncritical acceptance of the ideology of constant growth, that's still the majority view. It is a minority view that there are limits to growth.

"Nothing is going to slow this down until we run out of oil. ... Truthfully, if I feel a sense of loss, it's the same sense of loss on the whole West Coast."
Snyder isn't bitter, just very sure that saving a place requires knowing it first, and that too few people take the time to know the landscapes around them the way everyone used to.

"Start out to know the difference between a native plant, and an introduced one. Notice where the watersheds are and which way the streams are flowing. You are teaching yourself the place, what is the natural vegetation and the lay of the land," Snyder said.

The best way to learn a place? Walk it, and slowly. Bicycling is second best because it teaches the gentle upgrades and down. A car erases all of the contours and anesthetizes the rider.

Knowing a place is everyone's business, and the work everyone used to do, Snyder said. "In normal times you wouldn't need to say these things," Snyder said. "This is what everyone's grandmother used to teach.

"It's a conversation that goes on all the time, that is keyed to the seasons. It is care taking. Having a certain basic sense of place and being locally nature-literate gives you something to work from."

The next step, of course, is to know your maps, and how to read them. Then learn to read the sky, and the seasons. Learn, too, not only the natural boundaries of the place you call home, but the ownership boundaries, "for then you will know who to call together," Snyder said, to do community work on behalf of a place.

Sharing a place is powerful, and that goes for Snyder as much as anyone: When the current owners of his former boyhood home, Pauline and David Dubois, met him unexpectedly for the first time Tuesday, it was like a gathering of lost relations, united by their common bond of sharing this home.

She was an English major in college, and Pauline said she had heard Snyder once lived here. So, she had been careful to never change the house much. And somehow, she never quite wanted to move.

"I guess," she said, beaming at Snyder, "you must be the reason."




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photos by Chrisitan Martin, copyright 2009

A fundraiser for the Liam Wood School of Fly Fishing and River Soldiering featuring David James Duncan, Sherman Alexie and Jeffrey Foucault; WWU * 9.25.09 * Bellingham, WA. Part two. Download by subscribing to Radio Free Fundi via links at the top of the sidebar, or stream below.

A fundraiser for the Liam Wood School of Fly Fishing and River Soldiering featuring David James Duncan, Sherman Alexie and Jeffrey Foucault; WWU * 9.25.09 * Bellingham, WA. Part one. Download by subscribing to Radio Free Fundi via links at the top of the sidebar.

Photos by me, copyright 2009.

November 19, 2006

Forest Grump
By JONATHAN MILES / New York Times

POSTCARDS FROM ED
Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast.
Edited by David Petersen.

Edward Abbey (1927-89) wrote letters the way he wrote books. “The shotgun method, I call it,” he wrote to his friend and fellow novelist Alan Harrington, in which Abbey cranked out “many, many, many books, in all directions, without taking much aim.” In a note to Jimmy Carter after the 1976 presidential election, Abbey blithely suggested hiring Allen Ginsberg to remodel the Pentagon. To the editors of The Arizona Daily Star, “so devoted to promoting mass immigration from Mexico,” he suggested moving the editorial offices to South Nogales, in Mexico, “where you can enjoy today the poverty, misery, squalor and gross injustice which will be the fate of America tomorrow.” He was moved to write again, a month later, to justify “the use of beautiful women in James Bond movies.” He wrote to admonish The Tucson Weekly for an article that deemed cheerleaders “stupid” (“ ‘Stupid’? They’re cute, soft, bouncy, sweet, sexy, beautiful”) two months before chiding a reviewer in The Times Book Review for suggesting that Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” lacked heart. That latter missive was itself a rebuke to a letter Abbey wrote to Bookletter, in 1977, in which he dismissed Wolfe as “the leading pom-pom girl of American journalism” — an insult that, come to think of it, he also partly rectified with his defense of cheerleaders.

If few surprises are embedded in this trim selection of letters, edited by Abbey’s pal David Petersen, it’s because Abbey, on the page, was always Abbey: free ranging, cymbal crashing, an anarchist in mind as well as politics, encased throughout his life in an ever-shaken snow globe of contradictions, provocations, bathroom-wall jokes and fortissimo declarations. Who but Abbey could have written a novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” that helped inspire a radical and deadly serious environmental movement (Earth First!) while containing a scene in which an argument about weather is settled with the line “Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear”? That was part of Abbey’s prickly charm, his Janus-faced appeal. One of the sublime pleasures of “Desert Solitaire,” his canonical memoir of working as a seasonal park ranger in eastern Utah, comes early on, when Abbey admits to stoning a rabbit to death for the sheer hell of it. For a generation accustomed to pious and priestly nature writing, this confession was welcome, a clear signal that Abbey was one of us: a fellow sinner in the temple of nature, part of the problem as well as the solution. Though allied in a common cause, Abbey provided the punk counterpoint to the reverent eco-hymns of writers like John Muir, Peter Matthiessen and Gary Snyder. “Rhapsodies,” he wrote to Edward Hoagland, “put me to sleep.” One’s eyes can’t glaze over while reading Abbey, because he’s forever poking them — sometimes for fun, sometimes for purpose.

Fittingly, then, this is a book of thorns. As a correspondent, Edward Abbey was impulsive, unsparing, irascible, epigrammatic and, by turns, wonderfully long-winded or gruffly economical. (Much of his correspondence, as this book’s title suggests, was on postcards.) For a writer whose oeuvre was so tilted toward autobiography and the physical world, Abbey rarely wrote about his exterior life — what he was seeing and doing away from his desk. “Went down through Cataract Canyon last week, a five-day boat trip,” was about as newsy as he got about his wilderness ramblings, and the world outside his door earned mostly perfunctory nods. “The raspberries are gone,” he wrote Hoagland. “The autumn flowers are in bloom ... and there’s a chill of winter in the air after sundown. And so on. Musn’t start sounding like Annie Dillard.” In these letters, Abbey is visible mostly from the neck up, driven to correspond by issues and ideas, by indignation more than affection. Not a single love letter appears, a conspicuous absence for a man who married five times and whose published journals (also edited by Petersen) steam with carnal tension.

How much of this is due to Abbey’s guarding his intimacies, and how much due to Petersen’s culling, is hard to gauge — in his introduction, Petersen laments the loss of many personal letters to floods and other calamities, and writes that “former lovers ... were chary to share their own private Ed” — but this much is clear: Of the 236 letters collected here, 75 are unsolicited salvos addressed to “Dear Editor,” “Dear Sir” and the like. “Dear Sir,” begins a typical note. “This is a complaint.” Even when doling out praise, Abbey frequently attached a dark lining to his silver clouds. As he wrote to a newspaper’s editors, after a few kind words: “But I must record a few carps.”

That “but,” introducing carps, was also a trademark of his correspondence with literary colleagues. In a letter to John Gardner, he praised “On Moral Fiction” as a “brilliant performance” before bemoaning Gardner’s cast of moral novelists: “Bellow, Cheever, Updike, Irving and Salinger (that juvenile neurotic!), are the dullest and blandest of contemporary American writers.”

A hot stream of such literary invective courses through these letters: Beckett produced “hoked-up fakery”; Faulkner’s depiction of the South was “strangely incomplete, or misleading, or even false”; John McPhee could be “utterly inane”; Updike, possessing the “soul of a sycophant,” wrote “essentially trivial” novels; Kerouac was “a creepy adolescent bisexual who ... wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanistic books”; and Bob Dylan, who “at the age of 30 ... still can’t grow a man’s beard,” wrote “bubblegum lyrics.” By the same token, he was fierce in his championing of writers he admired, not only philosophical compatriots like Charles Bowden, Wallace Stegner, A. B. Guthrie Jr. and Wendell Berry, but also less expected contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah.
Abbey’s standards — in literature as well as in ecological stewardship — were often brutally high. “Reality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody’s typewriter, even Tolstoy’s, even yours, even mine,” he wrote to John Nichols. Moreover, he knew that his demand that literature invariably double as social criticism, his idea of the writer as front-line activist, was an exacting one. “Art first? or the community (meaning all life, not only human life)? Or first one, then the other?” he wrote Barry Lopez. “Both, I say, in any case. Somehow.” That “somehow,” with its implied sense of the difficulty of his ambitions, was key to Abbey’s worldview. Though an idealist in the starkest sense, he was aware that the battle against growth, greed, environmental exploitation and “technological tyranny” was already half-lost, that he was Quixote vs. the windmills, which he slyly encapsulated in the tragicomic motto “Keep it like it was.” Somehow.

“If most Americans eventually decide that they want to ... surround our national parks with an industrial slum of strip mines, power plants, trailerhouse cities ... there’s not much that people like me can do about it except complain,” he wrote to an interviewer. And complain Abbey did, as these letters amply demonstrate. Yet it was in his books — most notably “Desert Solitaire,” “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” “The Journey Home” and “The Fool’s Progress” (a bawdy grievance lodged against life itself) — that Abbey took the complaint and transformed it into an art form, distilling beauty from bile. “I know the earth,” Pablo Neruda once wrote, “and I am sad.” That wasn’t enough for Abbey. I know the earth, he roared, and I am mad.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Edward Paul Abbey, Radio Free Fundi presents four stories, written and read aloud here by "Cactus Ed", the late, great writer and essential voice of the American desert. I "obtained" these spoken word pieces on cassette while visiting Moab, Utah and Arches National Park for the first time in 1994. Each is a brilliant combination of memoir, fiction, polemic and adventure tale, composed in Abbey's singular voice -- a voice that balanced anger, humor, heartbreak, generosity and wisdom in his full-barrelled defense of freedom & wilderness.

Excerpt from Abbey's Wikipedia bio: "Sometimes called the "desert anarchist," Edward Abbey was known to anger people of all political stripes (including environmentalists). In his essays the narrator describes throwing beer cans out of his car, claiming the highway had already littered the landscape. Abbey has been criticized by some for his comments on immigration and women. He differed from the stereotype of the 'environmentalist as politically-correct leftist', by disclaiming the counterculture and the "trendy campus people" and saying he didn't want them as his primary fans, and by supporting some conservative causes such as immigration reduction and the National Rifle Association. He devoted one chapter in his book Hayduke Lives to poking fun at left-green leader Murray Bookchin. However, he reserves his harshest criticism for the military-industrial complex, "welfare ranchers," energy companies, land developers and "Chambers of Commerce," all of which he believed were destroying the West's great landscapes. Abbey refused to be ideologically pigeonholed by the left or the right; above all he was a staunch advocate for wilderness preservation and ecological protection. Abbey thrived on controversy; his popularity has proven to span generations. Abbey even had a FBI file opened on him on account of a 1947 letter he posted while in college urging people rid themselves of their draft cards."

I have another round of stories from a companion cassette that I will podcast at a later date. Feedback is welcome: djfundi@podcastcafe.org